ABSTRACT
The question of immanence and transcendence in Kafka easily calls for confusion. To put it quickly, there is a whole line of interpretation which maintained that the predicament of Kafka’s universe can best be described in the terms of the transcendence of the law. Indeed it seems that the law is inaccessible to Kafka’s “heroes,” they can never find out what it says, the law is an ever receding secret, even its very existence is a matter of presumption. Where is the law, what does it command, what does it prohibit?1 One is always “before the law,” outside of its gate, and one of the great paradoxes of this law is that it doesn’t prohibit anything, but is itself prohibited, it is based on a prohibition of the prohibition, the prohibition itself is prohibited.2 One can never get to the locus of prohibition-if one could do that then one would be saved, or so it seems. The transcendence of the law, on this account, epitomizes the unhappy fate of Kafka’s subjects, and the only transcendence there is in Kafka’s world is the transcendence of this law which seems like an unfathomable, ungraspable deity, a dark god emitting obscure oracular signs, but one can never figure out its location, purpose, logic, or meaning.
